The Sandman season 2 filming begins this summer — and that's good news

om Sturridge as Dream, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death in The Sandman
(Image credit: Netflix)

The Sandman season 2 has so far been spared from Netflix’s recent culling of TV shows — though there’s some debate as to whether or not it will be called season two. Fans and critics alike loved the first season of the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s DC Comics masterpiece and have been craving more. Now, we have an idea of when exactly more may be coming.

At Fan Expo San Francisco, Mason Alexander Park (who played Desire in season one) confirmed two things. First, Netflix is explicitly not referring to the next installment of The Sandman as season 2. Secondly: they are going to begin filming in the summer of this year. While they don’t elaborate on how long that filming should take or how many episodes it will cover, this at least seems like a positive sign that more episodes are on the way.

See them say it for yourself, here:

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However, Sandman fans could be waiting a long time for those episodes to pop up on their Netflix app. As we speculated about the upcoming episodes previously — there could be a long time between when filming starts and when episodes finally air. 

The Sandman season 2: When to expect more episodes

There’s now a fair amount of concrete evidence to help us deduce when the next batch of Sandman episodes will drop. 

The first season of The Sandman began in October 2020 and wrapped filming in August 2021. That’s nearly a full year of filming for was ultimately 11 episodes, or roughly a month per episode. 

Tom Sturridge as Dream, reading the book of Rose Walker, in The Sandman

(Image credit: Netflix)

With that same timeline, that means an additional 11-episode season would have filming wrapped around the end of May 2024 if filming starts in early July 2023. It then took a further year for season one’s episodes to air, meaning that we might not see episodes of The Sandman until May 2025 if the same timelines are required. That's definitely bad news for Sandman fans.

However, Netflix has been very intentional in not calling it season two, quite possibly because they won’t release a full season of episodes at once. Instead, they may do a five or six-episode volume of episodes that covers just a single volume of the Gaiman DC Comics run. If they do that, we are instead looking at five to six months for filming and another five or six months before it hits the screen. That gives new episodes of The Sandman an expected arrival date of summer 2024, which feels much more realistic.

Our current best estimate remains August 2024 — exactly two years after the release of season one. This would fit the timeline we just laid out in our season two hub and make sense from a marketing and planning perspective of keeping a similar release schedule in the calendar. 

Plus, getting more Sandman sooner is definitely good news for fans of the Netflix series. So stay tuned to our Sandman season two coverage for more updates as the next batch of episodes starts production. 

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Malcolm McMillan
Senior Streaming Writer

Malcolm McMillan is a senior writer for Tom's Guide, covering all the latest in streaming TV shows and movies. That means news, analysis, recommendations, reviews and more for just about anything you can watch, including sports! If it can be seen on a screen, he can write about it. Previously, Malcolm had been a staff writer for Tom's Guide for over a year, with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), A/V tech and VR headsets.


Before writing for Tom's Guide, Malcolm worked as a fantasy football analyst writing for several sites and also had a brief stint working for Microsoft selling laptops, Xbox products and even the ill-fated Windows phone. He is passionate about video games and sports, though both cause him to yell at the TV frequently. He proudly sports many tattoos, including an Arsenal tattoo, in honor of the team that causes him to yell at the TV the most.